Saturday, August 28, 2010

I don't normally do these things, but for some reason, it seemed fitting today (???)

2. What are the 3 most important things everyone should know about you? Actually ONE person said all three of these things in one sentence about 5 years ago. I questioned his prophetic ability at the time ha said it though:

1)" You are a woman of wisdom,

2) and understanding,

3) VISIONS, VISIONS, VISIONS."

3. When you aren't filling out question surveys like this one what are you doing? Working except when I finally decide to take a vacation.

4. List your classes in school from the ones you like the most to the ones you like the least (or if you are out of school, think of the classes you did like and didn't like at the time). Creative writing, English, Spanish, P.E., history, science, current events, government, math

5. What is your biggest goal for this year? Win the lottery

6. Where do you want to be in 5 years? Retired.

7. What stage of life are you in right now? Ready to retire

8. Are you more child-like or childish? child-like

9. What is the last thing you said out loud? "I don't know."

10. What song comes closest to how you feel about your life right now? Smother Me by The Used

11. Have you ever taken martial arts classes? Yup!

12. Does your life tend to get better or worse or does it just stay the same? It has it's ups and downs

13. Does time really heal all wounds? No. You have to work at it.

14. How do you handle a rainy day? Carry an umbrella

15. Which is worse...losing your luggage or having to sort out tangled holiday lights? losing luggage

16. How is your relationship with your parents? I visit their graves at least once a year since I live 500 miles away from them.

Will you miss them when they are gone? Every day

17. Do you tend to be aware of what is going on around you? Very aware

18. What is the truest thing that you know? Jesus was more than a man, he is the Christ, died on the cross for my sins, was resurrected and rules over all despite what we see around us in this physical realm. He did this because he loves me more than I can imagine.

19. What did you want to be when you grew up? Retired.

20. Have you ever been given a second chance? Yes

21. Are you more of a giver or a taker? I used to be more a taker, but now I am more of a giver.

22. Do you make your decisions with an open heart/mind? Yep!

23. What is the most physically painful thing that has ever happened to you? Having a baby...but it was worth it!

24. What is the most emotionally painful thing that has ever happened to you? You readers couldn't handle it.

25. Who have you hugged today? My hubby, my daughter and my son

26. Who has done something today to show they care about you? My hubby made me lunch, poured me a glass of wine and gave me a backrub...and well, I'll just stop there.

27. Do you have a lot to learn? A never ending process

28. If you could learn how to do three things just by wishing and not by working what would they be?

Memorize the entire Bible

Remember everybody's name

Keep a clean house

29. Which do you remember the longest: what other people say, what other people do or how other people make you feel? Feel

30. What are the key ingredients to having a good relationship? Focus on what they love, communication, sharing

31. What 3 things do you want to do before you die? Travel overseas, win the lottery, Help the hurting

32. What three things would you want to die to avoid doing? Those secrets are mine and mine alone.

35. Which decade do you feel the most special connection to and why? 60s

36. What is your favorite oldie/classic rock song? Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple

37. What country do you live in and who is the leader of that country?USA - President B. O bama If you could say any sentence to the current leader of your country what would it be? Jesus gonna get you.

38. What's your favorite TV channel to watch in the middle of the night? Netflix

39. What Disney villain are you the most like and why? Me? A villan?

40. Have you ever been a girl scout/boy scout? For a few months only. Hated it!

41. If you were traveling to another continent would you rather fly or take a boat? Boat if I have the time...fly if I don't

42. Why is the sky blue during the day and black at night? Light filtering through the atmosphere creates the color blue. Where there is no light, (at night) it is black

43. What does your name mean? Of nobility, welll-born

44. Would you rather explore the deeps of the ocean or outer space? I'll let someone else do that.

45. Word association What is the first word that comes to mind when you see the word:

Pink: girly

White: pure

Elvis: swivel

Magic: evil

Heart: pump

Clash: attack

Pulp: grunge

46. If you could meet any person in the world who is dead who would you want it to be? Mary, the mother of Jesus

47. What if you could meet anyone who is alive? The guy handing me my lottery winnings

48. Is there a movie that you love so much you could watch it everyday? Waking Ned Devine

49. You are going to be stuck alone in an elevator for a week. What do you bring to do? I would bring a person...MacGyver, so he can get me the heck out of there because I'm claustrophobic!

50. Have you ever saved someone's life or had your life saved? Yep! To both.

51. Make up a definition for the following silly words..

Fruitgoogle: Candy for techys

Ambytime: Wake up call

Asscactus: an ex-boyfriend/husband who is a real jerk

52. What was the last thing you made with your own hands? grocery tote bag (this morning)

53. What was your favorite toy as a child? animal shaped erasers

54. How many TV’s are in your house? 5

55. What is your favorite thing to do outside? Watch the wind blow

56. How do you feel when you see a rainbow? Loved

57. Have you ever dreamt a dream that came true? No

58. Have you ever been to a psychic/tarot reader? Nope!

59. What is your idea of paradise? Heaven

60. Do you believe in god and if so what is he/she/it like? Yep! Loving, awesome, caring, giving, fair and perfect.

61. Do you believe in Hell? Definitely

62. What one thing have you done that most people haven't? Belly danced professionally, teach martial arts, work in a jail, throw hot water outside my door just to see it freeze in mid-air because it was so cotton pickin' cold outside.

63. What is the kindest thing you have ever done? Not really sure. Saved a kid from drowning once.

64. Are you a patient person? Usually

65. What holiday should exist but doesn't? Everyday should be a holiday!!! 66. What holiday shouldn't exist but does? New Year's Day, or April Fools Day (but I like April Fools Day)

67. What's the best joke you ever heard? Not really into jokes but I like hearing them sometimes. 68. Where is the most fun place you have EVER been? SIX FLAGS, definitely!

69. Is your hair natural or dyed? dyed...mostly

70. Do you have any deep dark secrets or are you pretty much up front? Basically an up front person, but there are a few things in my life that aren't for public knowledge

71. What is under your bed right now? Dust and the floor

72. If you were in the Land of Oz would you want to live there or go home? Oz is a bit too weird for me!

73. If you drive do you frequently speed? Hardly ever.

74. What is the world's best song to dance to? Oye, como va. by Santana

What song was on the last time you danced with someone? Some sort of salsa in El Salvador

76. Do you prefer Disney or Warner Brothers? Disney

77. What is the first animal you would run to see if you went to the zoo? Monkeys stand for honesty, giraffes are insincere, and the elephants are kindly but their dumb; orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages and the zookeeper is very fond of rum. Zebras are reactionaries, antelopes are missionaries, pigeons plot in secrecy and hamsters turn on frequently....what a choice. OK, I admit I borrowed this from Simon and Garfunkle.

78. Would you consider yourself to be romantic? yep

79. If the earth stopped rotating would we all fly off? Yep

80. What is the one thing that you love to do so much that you would make sacrifices to be able to do it? Swim

81. If you (and everyone) had to lose one right or freedom, but you could pick which one everyone had to lose, what would you pick? No one can force me to choose to lose a freedom.

82. If you had to choose would you live on the equator or at the North Pole? I already lived in North Pole (the town, that is. It's in Alaska). I think I prefer the warm weather the older I get.

83. Would you rather give up listening to music or watching television? TV, definitely!

84. What do you think makes someone a hero? Doing the right thing even though they are more frightened than they have ever been in their life.

85. What cartoon would you like to be a character in? Sponge Bob

86. Name one thing that turns your stomach: Seeing someone with an open wound that is covered with maggots! (I've seen it before)

87. What was the last thing you paid for? Sewing thread

88. Are you a coupon clipper? Nope

89. Get anything good in the mail recently? Something I ordered from an Etsy seller.

90. Which would you rather take as a gym class...dancing, sailing, karate, or bowling? I've already done dancing, karate and bowling. Would LOVE to learn how to sail.

91. In Star Trek people 'beam' back and forth between different places. What this means is they stand in a little tube and their molecules are deconstructed and sent to another tube somewhere else where they are reassembled. Only problem is when the molecules are deconstructed the person is dead. When they are put back together it is only a clone that has all the dead person's memories. So...Who came up with this weird question anyway??????? So what if my molecules are scrambled for a few seconds, they are still MY molecules, so it is still me getting reconstructed at the end of the transport.

92. What insects are you afraid of? Mostly arachnids

93. If you could print any phrase on a T-shirt, what would it say? ??? You figure it out...

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Ever since I was a young child, I would hear my mom talk about something called Vaudeville. Her stories included performances as a young child in this phenomena all over the United States. Apparently, at one point, she had a partner in the act, but parents got into an argument and broke up the act. The argument went so far as to having the pictures taken of the two of them performing cut in half and partner side tossed away.

The only thing I really knew about vaudeville is that it seemed that it was a varied bunch of performances done by folks young and old all over the U.S. and that many early film actors came originally from vaudeville acts.

Interestingly, since my mother lived in the hub of early movie films and in Los Angeles, she had heard of the opportunity to try out for "The Little Rascals" in the film media. Her mother, hearing of the same, scoffed at the idea, saying that "such things like that will never become popular", and refused to let mom audition. Boy, was she ever wrong!

But, I digress. I wanted to tell a little history of what was vaudeville, so here is what I know.

Vaudeville was a form of variety entertainment that became popular from around the 1880s until the early 1930s. Performances were like a variety show of more modern television. Acts included musicians, dancers, comedians, magicians, animal trainers male and female impersonators, acrobats, singers, jugglers, short plays, athletes; almost anything that could be performed on a stage setting. It was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in North America for many decades.

Before the American Civil War, entertainment existed a bit differently. There were different types of variety type performances, such as Shakespeare play, circuses, dime museums, wild west shows and medicine shows. Saloons, music halls and burlesque houses catered to a form of entertainment that was a bit more risque. In the 1840s, minstrel shows became popular. Vaudeville incorporated all of these various forms of entertainment into a stable, institutionalized format.

In the early 1880s, a circus ringmaster, Tony Pastor who turned theatre manager, capitalized on the spending power of the growing American middle class by featuring "polite" variety programs in several of his New York City theatres. The birth of vaudeville was born. He hoped to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic in uptown New York City by barring the sale of liquor and bawdy material from his shows. He also offered gifts of coal and hams to those attending. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.

By the late 1890s, vaudeville had large circuits in almost every sizable location in the U.S and Canada, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. One of the biggest circuits was Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit that brought together 45 vaudeville theatres in 36 cities by 1919. Another major circuit was run by Alexander Pantages, who owned more than 30 vaudeville theaters and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more in both the United States and Canada.

As performers established national followings, they worked their way from often arduous working conditions to better pay and "the Big Time". The capitol of the big time was New York City's Palace Theatre, built by Martin Beck in 1913. The Palace provided what many vaudevillians considered the climax of their vaudevillian career.

A number events occurred that caused the decline of Vaudeville. Many vaudeville performers began to transfer from the vaudeville circuit to the movie business. In an effort to keep vaudeville alive, Alexander Pantages quickly incorporated motion pictures in his shows around 1902 and later went into a partnership with Famous Players, a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. There was no official end to vaudeville, but it was obvious that it was going through death throes by the late 1920s.

Lesser priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the heaviest blow to vaudeville. Many performers such as W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Jimmy Durante were lured away from vaudeville to the cinema by better salaries and working conditions. Other performers, who entered in vaudeville's later years, including Jack Benny, Kate Smith, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Judy Garland, Rose Marie, Sammy Davis Jr., Red Skelton, Burns and Allen and the Three Stooges used vaudeville only as a launching pad for later careers.

Vaudeville suffered further with the rise of broadcast radio and then the wide availability of inexpensive receiver sets later in the decade. Standardized film distribution and talking pictures of the 1930s confirmed the end of vaudeville.

Perhaps the concept of vaudeville never really ended due to its strong influence on the film, radio and television. Television variety shows were inspired by the old vaudeville acts, one of the most famous being the Ed Sullivan Show.

By the way, you are probably wondering about the picture at the beginning of this writing. That was my mom at the height of her own vaudeville career. Wasn't she cute?